Akoya Publishing – serie

‘Where there is money, there will be sex.’Anthropologist Sine Plambech has dedicated her life to pursuing the trail of sex and money across continents.In Global Sex, she draws back the curtain on a hidden world, sharing intimate conversations with sex workers from Nigeria and Thailand living in Europe. And when she retraces the treacherous routes that led them from their families, she finds lives transformed by the money that absent mothers, daughters, wives and sisters send home.Plambech is unsparing in her analysis of the international sex trade, yet compassionate in her treatment of the women who work in it. It is these women who take centre stage, reminding us that behind every statistic, there is a human story.

DO YOU GLOW IN THE DARK?In Liliana Colanzi’s singular collection of short stories, set in a Latin America at once real and otherworldly, human vice contaminates every page. Amid eerie near-future landscapes, in communities both ordinary and uncanny, and during the very real fallout of a nuclear disaster, Colanzi’s characters must contend with a poisoned legacy.Unpredictable and vivid, You Glow in the Dark radiates in the reader’s mind long after the final page and announces a daring new voice in fiction.

‘I’m going to tell you what happened to me and what didn’t happen to me. The possibility that nothing happened to me is what's giving me the shakes.’Marta believes she is dying. With the onset of menopause, the changes to her body are stirring up new anxieties. Every time she feels a pain in her chest, a numbness in her arm, or a tension in her clavicle, she assumes she has cancer, or some other diagnosis she has yet to learn of.During a flight, she starts to experience a pain underneath her rib. Unsure whether the pain signals the ominous approach of death or a simple bout of flatulence, Marta descends into an examination of pain’s impact upon her life. Is her body failing her or is she failing her body?From one of Spain’s most widely read and acclaimed authors, My Clavicle And Other Massive Misalignments is a provocative and vulnerable semi-autobiographical novel rendering a memorable portrait of pain, health anxiety and menopause.

I sail out of the fjord, out towards the ocean, where there is air and I can breathe and I breathe. I breathe. It has been four years since Veronica Skotnes left her life on the mainland to live in isolation on a sailboat and experience the unforgiving wrath of the wind and the waves. Now, she heads towards Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, to visit islands where strangers share her longing for the sea. As she sets sail, she prepares to face the dangers of an open ocean and empty ports, in exchange for the relief of nature and community.North of the Winter Sun is an evocative portrayal of the hospitality found in isolated fishing villages, global warming’s impact on the ocean and its wildlife, and a young woman’s search for agency and freedom aboard an old, beloved boat.

I’M FRIGHTENED OF MY DREAMS, OF EVERYTHING I DON’T KNOW, BUT ALSO OF EVERYTHING I KNOW. Marisol’s country is collapsing. A military coup sends the five-year-old and her family fleeing into the night. They seek shelter in a refugee camp where her parents try to protect her from danger while they await asylum.Marisol spends her adult life trying to cope with the memories from her childhood, the aunts and uncles she left behind, the friends whose names she no longer recalls. But when her boyfriend wants to learn more about her past, she finds herself confronting the trauma that haunts her.Chiquitita is a tender novel about flight and exile, the passing of time, and the experiences that remain with us, refusing erasure.

‘My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabiting it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.’A young woman and her mother spend a day at the beach. Soon the woman is in labour, three months early. At the hospital she slips from the glare of the lights toward the deep shadows of her own childhood, while doctors and nurses fight to keep her and her baby alive.Moving with dreamlike intensity between a heart-breaking past and a heart-stopping present, this fearless novel asks: in longing for a child do we also long to break free of a mother? And what was it that happened exactly, that day at the beach?

Ping leaves Hong Kong for a prosperous life in New Zealand – or so she has been led to believe. Instead she works long hours frying fish in a rat-infested shop, and at home contends with a dissolute husband and four children who struggle with their mother’s unhappiness.Polyphonic and richly textured, Chinese Fish is an intergenerational saga spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. It is an intimate insight into family dynamics, oral and written legacies, migratory histories, and the lives of mothers and daughters.‘For these immigrantsfrom the impoverishedunsanitaryvillages of China,where beggars and vagabonds are numerous,and lepers peculiarly wretched,where the coast is infestedwith pirates, childrenkidnapped and sold, and whole familieslive on boats,New Zealand is a paradise.'

'Now that you've grown and I've fallen ill, our bodies can no longer fit together.'Winner of the Strega Prize 2023Ada d’Adamo is mother to Daria. Their days are absorbed by caregiving and routine. Daria’s profound needs remained undetected in pregnancy, and with her birth, Ada’s world is remade.As a dancer she must use her physicality in new ways, to keep her daughter safe. As a writer she must find a language to communicate beyond words. And when, on the cusp of her fifties, Ada herself becomes gravely ill, she takes the most courageous decision of all: to leave Daria their story.This is Gravity, a journey of isolation, anger and sometimes despair, through moments of joy and exquisite tenderness, towards a love stronger than life.

'Everywhere in the wilderness I hear the cries of other mothers. I call back to them, asking for help, but sometimes they can’t hear me through their own cries’A forty-day journey of trial and transformation has meaning in many cultures, including in Savaş’s own. In this candid, tender essay, she charts a path through an unknown landscape – the first forty days of motherhood – in search of herself and the words for what has happened to her, following the birth of her baby.